MAX SAWICKY reports that the Harrisonburg Kurds have had their sentences suspended.

JIM PINKERTON WRITES on Stephen Hawking, Edmund Burke, and humanity’s survival.

MALARIA: lessons from the TB struggle? Interesting article with this depressing passage:

The war on malaria — in theory more winnable than the war on AIDS because a cure exists — is instead being lost, Dr. Kochi says. In the 1960’s, malaria was considered potentially eradicable: DDT and chloroquine, a synthetic form of quinine, had been invented, and much of the tropics were under colonial rulers who, whatever their other faults, were good at killing mosquitoes.

Since then, DDT has been withdrawn because of its environmental damage, chloroquine and its successor, Fansidar, have become all but useless and the health systems in most of Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America have collapsed.

The body count is now at least one million a year, most of them children and pregnant women. There are 350 million cases of malaria each year; people may catch it repeatedly in hot seasons and be too weak to work, so it cripples rural economies.

The plan is to attack things differently, which seems like a good idea to me. Alas, though, there’s only so much you can do in the face of dreadful governments in the most affected areas. And that’s not a problem the WHO, or the UN, can solve. Indeed, it’s not a problem that the UN even wants to solve.

A KOS KONSPIRACY? “Earlier today as I wondered boldly through left blogistan, if occurred to me that, rather than the hissy fit I mentioned below, what we’re really seeing is coordinated attack on the progressive bloggers.”

Meanwhile, Robert Wright is defending Kos against David Brooks.

UPDATE: Hillary hires Peter Daou from Salon, and Dan Riehl is questioning the timing.

Jim Geraghty asks: “Has any prominent potential Republican candidate hired a ‘blog guy’?”

He also weighs in on Wright’s defense, which relies on his Kos timeline.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh: “Nowadays, you have to hire a blogger to fend off the bloggers. This blogging game is playing out nicely.”

Plus, defending Kos from inaccurate puns.

MORE: Still more questioning of the timing.

THE SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION IS LOOKING TO HIRE — Zephyr Teachout emails:

The Sunlight Foundation, a new nonprofit committed to transforming citizens’ relationship to government, is hiring a new staff person for outreach and organizing. The ideal candidate would be a highly organized overcommunicator, good at both building spreadsheets and developing relationships with bloggers, local activists, and budding activists.

The candidate must be passionate about open government and a natural extrovert, but experience is not required. Sunlight is nonpartisan.

Send resume, 2 references, and a one paragraph description about why you think the job suits you to .

They’re in DC and probably would want you to be, too.

MORE CHAIRBLOGGING, from Michael Demmons.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN has a question: “How do you feel about revealing the names of those on the Townhouse email list?”

Seems to me that it’s a matter of “public interest!”

A TRAINING VIDEO FOR BILL KELLER, courtesy of Frank Capra and Dr. Seuss, over at Hot Air.

UPDATE: A big roundup on the New York Times issue, from Pajamas Media.

MORE ON “KOS VS. THE CLINTONS:” It’s the battle of the century, or at least the election cycle.

The Columbia Journalism Review weighs in with “Kos: Yesterday’s hero, today’s goat.”

SOCK-PUPPETRY AT THE HUFFINGTON POST: Tom Maguire comments: “Is it possible that my wild guess that the Times is detemined to trivialize lefty blogs is actually on the mark? Has all this burbling about new media and storming the (star)gates really triggered some territorial impulse at an institutional level?”

His answer: “Yes.”

BLOGGER ROB “ACIDMAN” SMITH has died. He was a difficult guy, but a sometimes brilliant writer, and I wish I’d met him in person.

ANN ALTHOUSE on astrology.

UPDATE: Much, much more on the whole astrology/blogging issue at Blogometer. I have to say I agree with the Althouse take: “I don’t think writing about astrology means you’re nutty, though it’s great material for people to use if they want to portray you as nutty.”

BUSH CRITICIZES THE NEW YORK TIMES for publishing classified material: Gateway Pundit has the roundup.

Meanwhile, Michael Barone asks: “Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical.”

Tim Chapman is calling for a Congressional resolution condemning the Times. And Andrew McCarthy comments: “The Times prattles on about what it claims is a dearth of checks and balances, but what are the checks and balances on Bill Keller?”

UPDATE: Tom Maguire asks: “Tell me again whether there are any checks at all on this ‘power that has been given us.’ Where is the accountability at the Times – can We the People un-elect Bill Keller? . . . Or, if there is no accountability, is that really how we want to run our democracy? Don’t We the People have the right to decide that some national security secrets need to be kept secret? Or can any bureaucrat with an agenda overrule his elected superiors? Let me re-phrase that – can any bureaucrat with an agenda with which the Times is comfortable overrule his elected superiors on national security issues?”

OVER THE WEEKEND, I read Tom Nagorski’s Miracles on the Water : The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack, and enjoyed it very much. It’s the story of the sinking of the City of Benares, a liner carrying children being evacuated from the Blitz to Canada and the United States in 1940. One of the survivors said that he had never imagined that women and children were capable of such heroism. I shared no such preconceptions, but it’s still a terrific story.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up!

BILL KELLER ISN’T VERY BRIGHT, or else he thinks you aren’t. How else to explain this passage in his apologia for the Times’ publication of classified information about the terrorist financial surveillance program:

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government’s anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that’s the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

I realize that the Times’ circulation is falling at an alarming rate, but it hasn’t yet reached such a pass that its stories are only noticed when Rush Limbaugh mentions them.

A deeper error is Keller’s characterization of freedom of the press as an institutional privilege, an error that is a manifestation of the hubris that has marked the NYT of late. Keller writes: “It’s an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. . . . The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly.”

The founders gave freedom of the press to the people, they didn’t give freedom to the press. Keller positions himself as some sort of Constitutional High Priest, when in fact the “freedom of the press” the Framers described was also called “freedom in the use of the press.” It’s the freedom to publish, a freedom that belongs to everyone in equal portions, not a special privilege for the media industry. (A bit more on this topic can be found here.)

Characterizing the freedom this way, of course, makes much of Keller’s piece look like, well, just what it is — arrogant and self-justificatory posturing. To quote Keller: “Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it’s the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements.”

Or institutional self-importance. As Hugh Hewitt observes, at the conclusion to a much lengthier critique: “He doesn’t have any defense other than his position as editor of a once great newspaper.”

And the Constitution does not permit titles of nobility.

UPDATE: Austin Bay comments: “The Times, apparently, told the story because it could and because it thinks it can get away with it.”

THE KHOBAR TOWERS: A tenth anniversary retrospective.

MORE THOUGHTS on the Maliki reconciliation plan discussed below, from Mohammed at Iraq the Model.

GILLIARD-GATE: Jason Zengerle writes:

Steve Gilliard claims that he did not write the email I attributed to him in this post. After doing some further investigating, I’m afraid to say that he is correct. He did not write that email. I apologize to Gilliard for not checking with him before publishing my post, and I regret the error.

He provides some explanation on what happened, too.

TERRORISTS MURDER Russian diplomats.

ROBERT KENNEDY REDUX: “Despite the hype, the Times seems to have brought up the Rolling Stone article mainly to mock the lefty blogs. . . . We shall not let the NY Times paint with too broad a brush – although I am sure there were plenty of lefty blogs that rallied to Kennedy’s fantasy, plenty of other top lefties stayed away (Odd how the Times missed that in describing Kennedy’s critics – one might almost think they would like to discredit the lefty blogs as a class in order to preserve their own ascendancy in the liberal pantheon). ”

It’s almost as if there’s some sort of coordinated Big Media effort underway, or something.

“AXIS OF ABUSE:” Austin Bay is very unhappy about the New York Times’ close relationship with leakers of classified information.

So is Jim Dunnigan.

Hugh Hewitt is calling for Congressional condemnation.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More revolving doors and close friendships:

When defense contractor Nicholas Karangelen launched a political action committee directed by the stepdaughter of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, he added another dimension to a tight circle of Capitol Hill relationships that is under federal investigation.

The relationships revolve around Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, who leads the Appropriations Committee and has extraordinarily close ties to lobbyists Letitia White and Bill Lowery.

White worked for Lewis for 21 years before joining Lowery’s lobbying firm in 2003. Lowery, a former San Diego congressman who sat on the Appropriations Committee, is one of Lewis’ closest friends and his principal fundraiser.

Read the whole thing (via TPM Muckraker). Actually, the most damning part may be this statement: “A spokesman for the lobbying firm defended its work as typical of Washington advocacy in an era of explosive growth in earmarking.”

ANN ALTHOUSE: “I assume there is a conspiracy and a strategy to investigate Kos. And it’s so easy to do because it can succeed even if it fails to turn anything up, because it will provoke him, and when he reacts, they’ll all say he’s paranoid, belligerent. Escort that man back outside the gate.”

UPDATE: Rogers Cadenhead is digging deeper.